from the book Before It's Light chapter: Red Velvet G-Strings And Apricot Sighs
(mad girls, Marilyn, Lorena, Jesus, and Jackie)

 
Her Penis For a Day

it lay in my hand,
seemed to promise
there would be
sweetness if I

obeyed. I opened
the window, opened
my palm and thought
it would lift up,

like a dove, free. I
thought I could
fling it into the
night and it would

float up, become a
star, a light I’d
no longer feel the
darkness in, sure

as my name is
Lorena

 

Lorena Remembers The Night She Had
            a Penis of Her Own

as unlike what it
was when attached
as a woman whose
lifeline to a ship
or man is cut
and she flounders,
bloats, belly up
on the waves
of whatever holds
her, no longer
in control. It
flopped, a stranded,
desperate fish,
scared as I felt
when he came back
bellowing and wild.
The blob of lost
slippery skin
could have been me,
huddling close
to the edge of the
bed, afraid
not to give in.
I could have been
what I held in
my hand that night,
cowering, quivering.
coming apart tho
somehow, even
wounded, abandoned,
I made it too

 

My Afternoons with Dylan Thomas

It was just a blur, like you might think,
stumbling from the White Horse Tavern,
the maples already tinged with blood.
He wasn’t booming and loud, he wasn’t
his voice, wasn’t’ that poet booming
on records, all Swansea and raging.
There was no wild dying of the light.
We stopped for egg creams. He loved

them better than the cream of a woman’s
thighs many say he collapsed in, took
the long-legged bait and shipwrecked,
but it was the cove of skin, the warmth,
everything unlike the dark coal mines or
the grey mist of Rhemmy. I won’t forget
the softness of his curls. He wasn’t my
type, too fair and he didn’t work out,

his body soft as his lips. He was more
like a pet, a kitten I could let cuddle
against me. Was I a virgin? What does
that matter. Or whether he was a good
lover. When he held my cat, who
always hissed at new people, she let
him press her into his skin as if, like
when he held me, her fur could keep

fear from spilling and staining the
rest of Wednesday

 
    from my book:
  
Before It's Light - Lyn Lifshin
$16.00 (1-57423-114-6/paper)
$27.50 (1-57423-115-4/cloth trade)
$35.00 (1-57423-116-2/signed cloth)
Black Sparrow Press

---

     Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses." She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as " a modern Emily Dickinson."

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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